Louis C.K. and Tig Notaro, Sparring on the Battlefield of Art

In the new season of Tig Notaro’s Amazon series, “One Mississippi,” a progressive radio station programmer dogged by rumors of sexual misconduct invites a female employee to his office for a meeting, where he masturbates behind the desk while she talks.

If this scene evokes internet rumors about Louis C.K. — an executive producer of “One Mississippi” — it’s because a recent interview with Ms. Notaro encourages that reading. She said that he now has nothing to do with the series and that he “should handle” the accusations, which had been reported by Gawker and singled out by Roseanne Barr.

“One Mississippi” went online on Friday; the next day “I Love You, Daddy,” a new movie starring and directed by Louis C.K., had its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. Reportedly a comedy that digs into the question of how to approach gossip about the sexual transgressions of star artists (Woody Allen, say), the film suggests the lane that Louis C.K. prefers. In the past week, a debate about rumors has moved to the battlefield of art, pitting two of the greatest stand-up comedians working today against each other.

“One Mississippi” is a nuanced, romantic and charmingly drawn series, a moseying six-episode slice of life that occasionally detours down dark alleys. It’s a marvelously layered show centering on a series of unlikely relationships, in which the laughs come from character details more than punch lines.

Ms. Notaro is no polemicist, but in the second season, she has married her deadpan sensibility to a work that expresses a strong point of view on sexual assault: The justice system is stacked against victims, and our culture more broadly has become too blasé about widespread harassment. The feat of the show is the effortless way it blends the dark and the light, persuading you that narratives with comedy and tragedy side by side are the best reflection of the real world.

Ms. Notaro, who plays a character named Tig, is often at odds with her love interest, Kate (her real-life wife, Stephanie Allynne), on how to think about sexual misconduct. After Kate’s experience with the radio programmer, she recalls, with mild disapproval, the inappropriate behavior of a coach in her high school days, and Ms. Notaro corrects her: “By the way, you were molested.” Kate disagrees: “But that happens to me all the time.”

The show is most pointed when the two women try to find redress for the behavior of the radio programmer, Jack (Timm Sharp). In an echo of the way Louis C.K. championed Ms. Notaro after her seminal confessional set with its famous opening joke — “Hello. Good evening. Hello. I have cancer. How are you?” — the programmer tells Tig that he became obsessed with her work when she began doing “deeper, darker more personal material.”

But when she confronts him about masturbating, Jack denies any transgression, and when Kate and Tig approach his boss, they find him sympathetic but ineffectual. “One Mississippi” focuses on the trauma of being a victim, reflected in the way the masturbation scene is shot, shifting to a close-up of Kate’s anguished face as Jack becomes a blur. “We wanted to show that you can be assaulted without even being touched,” Ms. Notaro told The Hollywood Reporter.

This scene provides a contrast to a stunning episode of “Girls” last season, a portrait of sexual assault by a powerful man. After Hannah (Lena Dunham) writes about a novelist’s sexual encounters with young women, the novelist, a divorced father played by Matthew Rhys, invites her to his apartment. He is seductive and argumentative and Hannah has already written about him, so their dynamic is complex and shifting.

What Ms. Notaro portrays pointedly is not. In her show, the facts of the assault are simple, but the system for handling it is not. In a time when polarized debate over sexual assault often breaks down between those who say society needs to do more to protect victims and others who insist it must do better at respecting the due process of the accused, “One Mississippi” doesn’t just take a side, it also skewers the weak spots of the opposing one.

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Louis C.K. in a scene from his new movie, “I Love You, Daddy.”CreditCourttesy TIFF

Louis C.K. usually seems less comfortable taking sides than jumping between them. In his controversial monologue on “Saturday Night Live” in 2015, he invited audiences to understand the pedophile’s point of view. To be clear, he wasn’t defending pedophiles, but his comedy is dialectical, finding its perspective through debate, juxtaposition and satire.

When he portrayed sexual assault on his FX series, “Louie,” he often seemed to be testing how far he could keep an audience’s sympathies on the side of a sexual abuser. In a 2012 episode, a character played by Melissa Leo delivers a passionate attack on male double standards about sex before she rapes Louie, his sad-sack alter ego. In an episode last year, Louie drags his babysitter across the apartment trying to kiss her. It was an uncomfortable scene to watch.

I have not seen “I Love You, Daddy,” but Louis C.K. told my colleague Cara Buckley that when it comes to the morality of beloved artists whose private lives are under clouds of scandal: “The uncomfortable truth is, you never really know. You don’t know anybody.”

This speaks to an often ignored fact about stand-up comics who make art about characters named after themselves: Their work may draw on real life but can be as fictional as any other art form.

In the same interview, Louis C.K. said he wouldn’t respond to the allegations, explaining, “If you actually participate in a rumor, you make it bigger and you make it real.” When asked if the rumor wasn’t real, he responded, “No. They’re rumors, that’s all that is.”

Yet Louis C.K.’s slightly evasive response stands out precisely because he has long won fans over by being so open about his private side, in his work and in interviews. (On Marc Maron’s podcast, he talked bluntly about dealing with sexually compulsive behavior and using masturbation to handle anxiety.)

Being open about his flaws, sexual and otherwise, earned him sympathy and perhaps even set expectations. Now he says he wants to just speak about the work, even as his new film will inevitably invite discussion about his life. It’s a tricky balancing act, especially when Ms. Notaro says she hopes her show inspires victims to speak out.

Part of what makes the comedy of Louis C.K. and Ms. Notaro exciting is that they both often suggest they are giving us a peek at an actual life. But once you blur the lines between what’s real and what is not, it can be difficult to bring the distinction between the two back into focus.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Louis C.K., Tig Notaro And a Line In the Sand. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe